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They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte's portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: They came to Virginia City
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: New England is a finished
Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Something can be done with
The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The proper union of gin
The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The nation had had two
The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The water of life was
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Pessimism is only the name
Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Let us candidly admit that
Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Art is the terms of
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The dawn of knowledge is
California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: California was almost entirely a
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: One may lack words to
Art is man determined to die sane.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Art is man determined to
Between the amateur and the professional ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Between the amateur and the
Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: Sure the people are stupid:
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop - for convenience, the one hundredth meridian - you have reached the West.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The West begins where the
The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: The rat stops gnawing in
When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
Bernard DeVoto Quotes: When evening quickens in the
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